Honor Expands Caregiver Pool with New Partner Network

Building on its momentum of creating partnerships with other health care providers, San Francisco-based Honor has launched a new program with the aim of further expanding those types of arrangements.

Honor, which has raised $65 million in funding, currently has partnerships with senior living providers, independent home care agencies and continuing care systems, among others.

The rollout of the new program, titled Honor Partner Network, “formalizes” these existing relationships and ultimately allows existing and prospective partners to tap into Honor’s pool of caregivers, as well as its technological and operational platform.

“The Partner Program was born out of the idea on how do we make not just our technology, but our operations capabilities available to partners,” Nita Sommers, president of Honor’s Enterprise business, told Home Health Care News.

A broader pool

In the two-plus years since the company’s launch, Honor has taken pride in its caregiver management capacity, Sommers explained. Honor has become well-known for its technology capabilities that match caregivers and clients.

For this reason, a big component of the partner program focuses on alleviating the stress that comes with caregiver management—including training, staffing and performance review.

“The partner already has caregivers they’ve [employed] in their organization [and we] actually transition them over to Honor, and we begin to manage and really take all of that work,” Sommers said. “We take over that for them and then give them access to our broader pool of caregivers.”

This can prove valuable for smaller home care agencies struggling with talent and operational management as they grow the business, according to Honor CEO Seth Sternberg.

“[The Partner Network] allows them to really start growing again,” Sternberg told HHCN. “With a lot of these companies … it’s hard to grow because it’s so hard to operate. [The program] helps them accelerate their businesses and their products.”

Smaller home care companies are given the scale of the company’s pool of caregivers, and Honor is able to expand its geographic reach, according to Sommers.

Stringent standards

There is no cost for prospective partners to join the Partner Network. However, the company does have stringent standards for partners, Sommers explained.

“We work really closely with these partners and we have to make sure that they deliver to a certain quality standard, because, over time, what we really want is a network of partners that we can serve at a national level,” Sommers said. “For us, we care an awful lot in terms of how great in care management are our partners. What kind of reputation do they have? What are the standards that they have?”

Already, Honor has created partnerships with three companies in its service area as part of the new program: Cupertino, California-based Caring Hands Caregivers; Oakland, California-based CSS Home Care; and Carrollton, Texas-based Apple Care and Companion.

For Laurie Miller, president of Apple Care and Companion, the program enables them to address the industry’s caregiver shortage in a new way.

“Over the past few years, weʼve been spending an inordinate amount of time recruiting, hiring and managing our caregivers to maintain the quality of our care,” Miller said in a statement on Honor’s website.

By offloading the company’s “operational headaches,” the partnership allows Apple Care to focus on expanding business, she added.

While Honor is focused on expanding the program in the current geographic areas it services, it is open to offering the program in new markets, according to Sommers.

“[We’re] definitely keen, in terms of finding strong partners in new markets,” she said.

Honor did not offer specific details on which markets it is targeting, Sternberg explained.